Arthur Brooks on Where Is Happiness

Sam Harris

But let's go back to intelligence where we left it. We did not actually describe the difference between fluid and crystallized intelligence and the use to which you put these concepts in your book. So tell me, what are your thoughts on that topic?

Arthur C. Brooks

So Cattell, Raymond Cattell, the social psychologist, great British social psychologist, noticed that people, they get better at things through their 20s and 30s, that kind of 10,000 Hours deal where they have focus, the ability to work hard, a lot of working memory, and almost anything that you can get good at, from being an air traffic controller to being a French Horn player to being a college professor, a researcher in particular, that requires innovative capacity to crack the code to solve problems. That's fluid intelligence. And that gets better and better through your 20s and 30s. And weirdly, it tends to peak in your late 30s or early 40s, and then it tends to decline. And he noticed this. Cattell noticed this, that these abilities tend to decline. Now, if you're really a striver and you're really good at what you do, and most of the people listening to us right now, they're good at something. They're really the only ones in their 40s who are going to notice these declines. And the way that you notice it is what, you know, people in the management world call burnout. So you find that your dentist, for example, when he's, let's say, 43, has weirdly starts taking Fridays off to golf. It's like, why would you do that? Do this trivial kind of hobby instead of doing something that you love, like being a dentist? And the answer is because humans aren't happy when they're not making progress. The mathematicians will put it that all of happiness is in the first derivative. All of happiness is in getting better. This is a reason, by the way, Sam, that it's very easy to lose weight, but it's very hard to keep weight off. Because when the scale is going down, you're motivated and happy. And when you hit your goal, the reward for hitting your goal is now you never get to eat the things you like ever again for the rest of your life. Congratulations. And this is the nature of how we're wired. Progress is everything. And so what happens is that people get very frustrated and angry and desperate and afraid and sad when they're on the downslope of this fluid intelligence curve. What Cattell also pointed out is there's a second intelligence curve behind it that doesn't reward the same things. It's called crystallized intelligence, and it's based on all the things you know and how to use the things that you know. So your working memory is a lot worse. Your innovative capacity is worse. Your speed and your ability to solve problems is worse. But your wisdom is higher. Your pattern recognition is higher. Your vocabulary is higher. Your teaching ability is higher. And so what you need to do if you want to use that is actually start doing the things that favor that increasing intelligence. The great news, incredible news, is that crystallized intelligence increases through your 40s and 50s and even 60s and stays high in your 70s and 80s. So there's a guy at University of California at Davis, a guy named Dean Keith Simonton, who's the world's, I mean, I don't know if you've had him on your show. He's phenomenal. I've read his books, but yeah. He's wonderful. I mean, he talks about the cadence of creative careers. And he talks about the half-life where he measures the corpus of work and quantity and quality of people in different creative careers. And he finds that those that load on fluid intelligence like poetry, where you're just inventing stuff with words, that that has a half-life around age 40, where you've done half of Your lifetime work around age 40. When you think about it, you know, T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, their best works were written in their late 20s and early 30s, and both guys lived into their 80s. Now, if you look at something that loads on crystallized intelligence, the body of knowledge and how to use it, like historians, they're basically just teachers. You have to know, you have to have the New York Public Library in your head to be able to be a historian. Their halfway point is about age 65. So if you're a historian, take care of your health because your best books are probably coming in your 80s is the point. And that's the difference between a career that loads on fluid and a career that loads on crystallized. Now, our job, you and me, is to be walking in our 40s and 50s from our fluid intelligence curve onto our crystallized intelligence curve by manifesting what we do in different ways. Probably that goes from, you know, writing mathematical theorems, which I was doing, to writing a column in the Atlantic and teaching at Harvard, which I'm doing now. This podcast that you're doing is like a master display in crystallized intelligence because you're teaching with this particular podcast. This is a good thing that you're doing to favor what you're naturally getting good at in your 50s. One